It all started with a domestic dispute. Okay, so it was more complex than that, and there were certainly many layers behind the origins of Joseph Smith’s polygamy revelation, but for the sake of my point let’s just say one of the most controversial documents in Mormonism’s history was meant to solve a marital spat….
Category: Book Review
Review: Moss and Baden, BIBLE NATION
Within a few minutes’ walk from the United States Capital in Washington DC, a visitor might stumble upon an impressive eight-story structure dedicated to “reacquaint[ing] the world with the book that helped make it.” The Museum of the Bible opened just last month after several years of anticipation. In some ways, it is similar to…
Review: Tom Cutterham, GENTLEMEN REVOLUTIONARIES
The American Revolution was founded upon elite gentlemen willing to stake their reputation on a political gamble. That’s what Tom Cutterham argues in his new book, Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic (Princeton UP, 2017), anyway. The British Empire featured countless men who were eager to climb the ranks of nobility–class…
Review: Lincoln Mullen, THE CHANCE OF SALVATION
In a Land of Liberty, it makes sense that the national religion is centered on choice. That’s the thrust of Lincoln Mullen’s argument in his new and ambitious book, The Chance of Salvation: A History of Conversion in America (Harvard UP, 2017). Throughout the nineteenth century, Mullen argues, Americans shifted from seeing religion as something one…
Review: Brent Rogers, UNPOPULAR SOVEREIGNTY
A hard confession from someone who specializes in the early republic and antebellum periods: the 1850s is my favorite decade to teach in the American survey. It always feels like my lectures are a sprint throughout he semester, given the nature of the course, but it still seems to pick up speed once we hit…
Review: Eric Hinderaker, BOSTON’S MASSACRE
The Boston Massacre has loomed large in America’s historical memory. Taking place five years before the battles at Lexington and Concord, the episode featured British soldiers firing into a gathering of unarmed colonists. Four died on the scene, and another succumbed to mortal wounds a few days later. The moment and its martyrs were immortalized…
Review: Spencer McBride, PULPIT & NATION
If the mark of a good book is it provides lots of intriguing material, fascinating characters, and much to debate, then Spencer McBride’s Pulpit & Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (University of Virginia Press, 2017) is a good book. In an age where the traditional trajectories of religion and politics seem in transition,…
Review: Richard Van Wagoner, NATURAL BORN SEER
Prior to his untimely death, Richard S. Van Wagoner was a prolific and respected amateur historian of the LDS faith. Besides an excellent biography of Sidney Rigdon, he also authored a well-received history of Mormon polygamy. It was therefore justified when the Smith-Pettit Foundation tapped him to write the first of a three-part biography of…
Review: William Mackinnon, AT SWORD’S POINT, PART II
For such a small chronological scope, William MacKinnon’s documentary history of the Utah War covers a lot of ground. Though the armed confrontation in 1857-1858 was theoretically isolated to the Rocky Mountains, its tentacles touched far and wide. Soldiers were sent as far south as New Mexico to purchase supplies. Facing the threat of another…
Review: James Alexander Dun, DANGEROUS NEIGHBORS
On Monday, the Junto featured a Q&A I did with James Alexander Dun, who teaches history at Princeton University, about his new book: Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (UPenn Press, 2016). Make sure to go read his smart and provocative comments over there. But I thought it’d still be worthwhile to jot…
Review: Mary Campbell, CHARLES ELLIS JOHNSON AND THE EROTIC MORMON IMAGE
The Mormon History Association community is small enough that you typically know what books are forthcoming and when. It is very rare, then, that a book captures us by surprise. However, when Mary Campbell’s Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image (Chicago UP, 2016) showed up on Amazon last year, some were puzzled. The author…
Review: Caitlin Fitz, OUR SISTER REPUBLICS
I blogged earlier this year about the “Continental” approach to the Age of Revolutions. Amongst the most persuasive examples of this new historiographical movement is Caitlin Fitz’s Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (Liveright, 2016). In the decade and a half after the War of 1812, Fitz argues, Americans were…
Professor Park's Blog 